I’m guessing Der Bayer’s answer from last year will still apply (apologies - I have not watched the video), but I was thinking about the dynamics of accidents and it gave me a bit of an idea.
A car has two objectives to accomplish in a collision:
[ol]]It has to maintain the integrity of the passenger compartment. (It doesn’t matter how good your airbags are if the front seats are wrapped around the tree.)/:m]
]It has to protect the passengers within the passenger compartment. (It doesn’t matter how solid the passenger compartment is if the driver is impaled on the steering column.)/:m][/ol]
What this would mean from a game perspective is: the better your Safety quality, chassis, and body, the better your car will perform on objective 1 in any accident (because you are reinforcing the passenger compartment and reinforcing/refining the crumple zones), and the better your safety technology and the better your interior options and quality, the better your car will perform on objective 2 (because the passengers will be better restrained within the cabin and be able to survive sharper deceleration events), but the final safety stat is going to be a weighted average of the two that favors whichever one is worse (e.g. a harmonic mean).
I think this would make optimizing for safety a more interesting and realistic process:
[ul]]While better safety tech would still be a big help to making crashworthy city cars, the quality sliders would be a lot more important./:m]
]While size would still be a big help to crashworthiness of large vehicles, a minimum level of safety technology would still be required to meet standards./:m][/ul]
It might also help players to add more realistic amounts of weight to their cars in the pursuit of safety (as -15 Advanced would no longer be an effective option in most cases).